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by hannob 2170 days ago
Isn't this more an example of "fail-open design is bad, use fail-close"? Or in other words "make an allowlist, not a blocklist"?

I mean look at those variables, this seems like a loosing battle. PERLLIB, PERL5LIB etc. - what if there's a PERL6LIB at some point or a NEWSCRIPTINGLANGUAGELIB variable?
3 comments
awirth 2170 days ago
Yes. This is why running without `env_reset` is considered inherently insecure and the typo fix wasn't considered a security fix by the sudo maintainers.

The list is still relevant to this discussion though as a nice "greatest hits" cheat-sheet of fun environment variables to play with here.

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lizmat 2170 days ago
Actually, there is such a thing as PERL6LIB: it's an environment variable still recognized by Raku (formerly known as Perl 6). As you may know, Perl 6 has been renamed to Raku (https://raku.org using the #rakulang tag on social media). FWIW, there is now also a RAKULIB environment variable :-)
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cookiengineer 2170 days ago
Well, touche.

I think that the fail-close design (I know them as positive-style branching) should be embraced everywhere possible.

But can this be actually achieved without breaking the ecosystem in the sense of having to start all over again?

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